which will compromise their future; we must not, more than we can help, let them permanently injure their health, or acquire habits which will handicap them physically, mentally, or socially, or grow up ignorant of things which they ought to know. But the more careful we are in these respects, the more, not the less, we need to compensate the lack of wrongness in serious matters by providing abundantly safe opportunities for going wrong, and learning by experience, in matters of no consequence. For among all the habits which science requires us to form, none is more important than the habit of learning when there is no man to teach us, of profiting by our own past errors, of rising on stepping-stones of our mistaken selves to correcter judgements. Now there are few places in which a child can do so many things wrong, without injury to himself or annoyance to anyone else, as in a carpenter's shop. He can begin to make something out of wood that has a flaw, or that is too soft for his purpose; or he can try to gouge out a piece that is too hard for anything but a very sharp chisel to bite into. He can begin on too small a piece; he can begin without taking proper measurements and put his centre-bit in the wrong place; and, when he finds himself baffled, he can try again another way. And when he is tired of failures he can
